With storage memories getting faster generation after generation, Samsung has now officially listed its latest NVMe SSDs called the 980 Pro, featuring lightning-fast read and write speeds and support for the next-generation PCIe 4.0 interfaces, along with improved heat management.
The new 980 Pro series is the direct successor of the PCIe 3.0 based 970 Pro models with upgraded transfer speeds. Samsung will release the 980 Pro series in 250GB, 500GB, and a 1TB model. Samsung chose to use TLC based memories instead of MLC, and so the rating is a bit low on the endurance part. And as usual, the endurance between the three storage offerings differ quite a bit. The 250GB 980 Pro has a lifespan of 150 TBW, the larger 500GB model is rated at 300 TBW, and the 1TB version is rated up to 600 TBW. On the contrary, the 1TB model of the previous 970 Pro has an endurance of 1200 TBW. We aren’t sure why Samsung would step it down on the endurance department for their first professional class PCIe 4.0 SSDs. Even the older 960 Pro is at 800 TBW. That said, SSDs don’t usually wear off that fast unless you are writing terabytes and terabytes of data on a daily basis.
And about those speeds, the 250GB 980 Pro kicks up to 6400 MB/s read and 2700 MB/s writes. The 500GB model kicks it up a notch, featuring read speeds up to 6900 MB/s and write speeds up to 5000 MB/s. That’s quite a difference between the base model and the rest of the storage models. The 1TB 980 Pro features the same write speeds as the 500GB model. However, the read speeds get a 100MB/s increment, resulting in 7000 MB/s read speeds.
As for the heat management to keep the chips cool, Samsung has featured nickel coating over the SSD controller, along with the SSD label that also serves as a heat spreader. Samsung also uses a new controller called the Elpis. The 4KB random read speeds of the new drives reaches 1 million for the 1TB model, 800000 IOPS for the 500GB model, and 500000 IOPS for the 250GB model. The 4KB random write speeds are 1 million for the 500GB/1TB models and 600000 IOPS for the 250GB base model.
There is still no official word on the pricing and availability of the new Samsung 980 Pro series, although, expect the new prices to be pricy. We hoped Samsung would also unveil a 4TB variant. Perhaps they are saving it for a later time and we have still yet to see the official unveiling of other series such as the Samsung 980 EVO and Samsung 980 QVO models.
